Monday, September 12, 2011

9/12

I have mixed feelings about the proliferation of 9/11 images that have flooded the airwaves and print media these past few days. Nearly every story and image is powerful and moving but at a certain point you can begin to feel you're being used.

I was looking for a photograph that meant something more than re-visiting the past when Len Prince sent me this picture. It's an iPhone snap of a contact sheet that he had never tried to print or publish but ten years later the picture makes a lot of sense.

It was taken on 9/12/01 near Ground Zero and is of the back window of a smashed-up police car that had been blown on top of another car. Someone had scrawled the date in the dust of 9/11 as both a record and - I like to think - a hope. 9/11 as we know changed everything, but it's what we do with 9/12 that counts.

For a moment it seemed like 9/12 had brought about an amazing togetherness and spirit in this country, but it didn't take long to disintegrate and go awry. Let's try to make this 9/12 something better.

Thanks for this.I avoided all coverage of that day: newspapers, TV, news shows, everything. I, too, think that it has become a caricature of what it could have been. Like you, in many ways it was squandered, smothered by ideology.

I went to the Newseum in DC this spring and went through their display and watched their video about 9/11. To see this again I realized that everything else pales by comparison. I left that area in tears, and noticed that there were multiple tissue boxes placed around the centerpiece of a destroyed antenna. I am not alone in mourning what happened that day, but I'm going to focus on this image that you show--it is what we do with it that matters. It's the going forward that makes a difference.

"If only all blogs were as life-affirming and tender-hearted as that of gallerist James Danziger. Whether his focus falls on the work of an individual artist or a particular theme, The Year in Pictures is compulsive reading."